Building an Aimpoint Part 1: The Parts Video

What’s up next is I’m getting ready to assemble my own Aimpoint Pro. I guess it’s kind of tradition that when you work at Aimpoint, which I’m not an employee, but they are sponsoring the show, you have to build your own Aimpoint site. I have to get in a complete blue suit with the hair net and the whole nine yards, in the clean room, should be really cool.

You want gravy with your meatloaf.

He’s in the process of bringing parts from where they’re taking out of inventory, cleaned and sanitized and then they’re brought through into the clean room, then we’re ready to start our process assembling a site.

So, to begin with we have three big parts, we have the inner tube, we have the house, and the rear tube, built individual, on this little island here. Then we have four lines that assemble the inner tube with the house.

At four lines deep, like that?

Four lines, we can build Compound 4, we can build the Micro. Every detail has its own barcode and it’s registered. If we receive the site back, you can have the serial number, you can see which date the article was receiving inspection and protocol, et cetera, so fully traceable.

Good deal.

We have to use this for protection. When we handling the LED, could be a little sensitive for electrostatic.
Oh, okay, yes. Look at that, send me in coach, I’m ready to play.

There is the inner tube and this is where we are going to assemble the ball rim.

For adjustments?
Yes, exactly.

Greased that, with this ring sets into so it can slide freely, it moves which is a good thing, so this will guide the ball barring into the slot.
Carefully remove it.
Good to go?

Excellent. The second thing on this station is the battery house. We have this tool here, so we take the glue, put a Lock Tight 418, tighten it again.

All right, check it with the achromatic.

Right there.
Look at that, spot on.
Two-hundredths…
Okay, so this is ready for the next step.

This is ready. Let’s start with the inner tube. On this area here, we are going to put on a little strip, go all the way around, like that. We have a little tool here, place the strip, and place the strip over the…

That’s slick.
Done. Your turn.

All right man, awesome, now I take this really slick little tool and then kind of cinch it down and then roll it around. I’m ready to move on to the next station.

After the strip, the lens goes in, this is the front lens and actually the lens is two lenses glued together and the miracle thing in between.

It’s tilted at an angle and that how it projects the red dot on it. Patrol Rifle Optic coming together. This guy here is kicking ass. Yes, he’s doing a good job.
You’re doing a great job too so.
Thank you very much, so far.

We are going to glue the rear tube and inner tube with some UV glue and we have a UV oven, and the UV glue is good because it can withhold high and low temperature.

I’m a little bit nervous in the service about this to be quite honest with you. I can tell this cat has done it a few times and worried about getting glue on the lenses. This is the rear lens first, a little bit too much, what do you think.

Actually its quite good.
Whoa, can you believe that? That’s the LAV bringing it home.

See if the UV is all done, place the inner tube in the fixture, make it as beautiful as possible.

Kind of tough, all right, I’m about ready to put the Diode on the inner tube. This is what projects the red dot onto the lens, you can then see with your naked eye a zero your gun and hit the target with, a very critical operation, needless to say.

You know this is a lot harder than I though, that good?

Yes.

Okay. How’s that look, does it work okay.

Yes, I think so. Now you have a complete inner tube, well done.

Good deal. What I thought was the coolest thing so far assembling the Aimpoint was putting the Diode in and figuring out how it project against the lens. What they do, they calibrate to where it has an absolute bare minimum parallax. They have five holes across the front of this plate that projects five dots and then they correlate them or bring them together at infinity.

What he told me was, back in the day when he first started here, they used to kind of eyeball this at a great distance and now they calibrate it on a machine where it’s much more parallax for it is for your human eye, looking through it.

Like what I tell my students in my training classes is, always try to keep the dot in the center of the 50 percent field of view, like you’re looking through the donut hole. From my experience when shooters get in different positions with the long gun. Where they’re going to see parallax coming in, is if the dot starts getting out into the edges or the donut ring essentially of you field of view. He confirmed that, he said that was a good way to look at it, so verifies what I’ve been teaching all these years is correct.

Sent to assemble inner tube in-house and now carefully.

You can see the spring tension it’s pointed towards the battery box. Your elevation and windage come in through the sides. There is some real technique involved. Good, all right so this is officially the end of Part 1 of Assembling the Site. Tomorrow we’ll put it together and it will be a completed Aimpoint Pro.